Turns on but wont go passed gray screen

M

mac10

Registered
I purchased a powerbook g4 from a friend a few weeks ago and it was working fine for the first couple weeks. the other day when I started it up it booted to the gray Apple logo screen as usual..but will not proceed from there. I've left it sit over night and when I get on it the next day it's still on that screen. What could be the problem/solution to this? Thanks!!

ps - I do some home business stuff from this computer and would appreciate a response ASAP. I do however understand that I'm not the only one with problems. Thank you so much for your help.
 
Turn the machine on while holding CMD-V (verbose mode). That will give you some idea what it is hanging up on. If it is something obvious, you can boot into single user mode (CMD-S) and repair the filesystem or whatever.

Anyway, see what verbose mode tells you and report back.
 
Thank you for responding. I tried booting in both modes, neither of which are working. It still boots into the gray apple screen then the apple logo moves slightly downward. I've never seen or heard of this before. Any other ideas?
Thanks again!
 
So it can't even load the kernel, eh? I'd guess that the hard drive is dead. Try booting with an external drive with a system on it or use an OS X install DVD. You can run the Disk Utility from there and see if teh drive is still functioning. You can also try to repair the volume from there.
 
Yeah the weird thing is he put a hard drive in it before he gave it to me and put the new OS on it. Since I didn't buy this straight from Apple I do not have the DVD you're speaking of. Like I said it was working fine for a couple weeks then it just stopped. I know it wasn't dropped because it stays stationary on another one of my desks. Could the hard drive just have went bad out of no where? I'm completely lost on what to do. Mac store maybe?
 
Do you have another Mac? If so, you could connect the two machines by a firewire cable and start your broken machine in "Target Firewire" mode by holding down the "T" key while powering it on. Your unbootable computer's drive will appear as a firewire drive to the other computer. And then you can try to repair it from there.

And yes, drives can go bad out of nowhere, unfortunately. But you may still be able to recover information off of it. They don't always fail all at once.
 
Yes I'm actually speaking with you on my Mac Mini. I will try that I just need to find my firewire cable. Thank you for sticking with me I really appreciate it. I'll report back once I try that and let you know what's going on. :)
 
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